Persona 5 Reaches Playable State Through PC Emulation

The long-running Persona series has been a staple of JRPG fans for quite some time now. Unfortunately, the main series has always been a PlayStation exclusive, while the spin-offs saw releases on the other consoles on the market.

Persona 5 released earlier this year for PS3 and PS4, and it will likely become one the last notable titles released for Sony’s last generation console. Fortunately for those out there who enjoy emulation, that PS3 release means there was a chance for the game to become playable on the PC in the near future.

In May, we reported that the development team said Persona 5 running at 4K and 60 FPS was very possible on the PC. At the time, it didn’t look like that was close to happening at all, but it looks like we might be closer than we thought. In April, the game ran poorly, to put it nicely, and it didn’t look like a playable state was close to fruition.

Fast forward to July and we have reached a playable state for Persona 5 on PC. The game itself runs on a PS3 emulator called RPCS3 and will require at least a mid-range PC to run Persona. Remember, emulating a game and natively running a game are two totally different beasts.

Keep in mind that the game may be playable, but it still has a long ways to go performance-wise. The developers have mentioned several players have already finished the game using emulation, so it can definitely be done. Here is what they had to say on their blog:

Yes, a few people have already beaten the entire 100+ hours long game in RPCS3 so essentially every issue is known to the developers, and all of the critical problems have been fixed. As the game looks more or less fine, performs more or less fine, and is provably beatable now without any strange hacks and workarounds we classify it as playable, but not perfect. One important aspect of this is that the Persona 5 engine is “framerate unlocked” so to speak, that is the game runs at full speed at almost any frame rate, like most PC games do for example. The actual interval where it runs at full speed is 15 – 60 fps, and for example an overclocked Haswell i5 can expect to play the game at about 10 – 20 fps in school and around Tokyo, and at about 20 – 30 fps in dungeons and battles.

The framerates may seem low but keep in mind that the PS3 and PS4 versions are both locked at 30 FPS. Through PC emulation, the game will be able to reach a much higher framerate as it features an unlocked framerate through emulation. After more tinkering, we might see it reach those levels. We’ll check back in a few months to see the progress the game has made then.